Heads Up Small Business

Small business mental health - the role of work contacts, friends and family

Patrice O'Brien:	Well, welcome. It's really great to be talking to people today about this really important topic of mental health of small business owners. So my name’s Patrice O'Brien. I'm the General Manager of Workplace, Partnerships, and Engagement at Beyond Blue and I'm really looking forward to this conversation today.
	I'd like to start by acknowledging the traditional owners of the land that we meet on today, the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation, and I'd like to pay my respects to their Elders, past, present, and emerging, and as Beyond Blue is an organisation with national reach, and as you may be watching this from all around the country, I would also like to extend those respects to all of our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people around Australia today.
	So I'm joined by a really fantastic panel today, who are going to join me in talking about this important topic of small business mental health. So I'd really like to just kick off by welcoming our four panellists and I'll ask each of them to introduce themselves. But all four of these panellists have really supported us in a number of different ways with our Small Business program at Beyond Blue, so we are already incredibly grateful to them. So I'll just start with an introduction if you wanted to kick off, Andrew.
Andrew Watson:	Yeah, thank you, Patrice. My name’s Andrew Watson. I'm an Assistant Commissioner with the Tax Office. I've been there around 25 years and my role is in the small business experience. So it's working on improvements for the future, to make it even easier for small businesses to deal with tax. But it's also looking at how people can better interact with the Tax Office when there's issues from a variety of things, and how we can get better at that going forward.
Patrice O'Brien:	Excellent. David?
David Gregory:	Okay. My name’s David Gregory. I'm the CEO of the Small Business Mentoring Service. We have about 180 mentors, that work with approximately 5,000 businesses every year, and about 52,000 small business members. We work with them predominantly on finance, marketing, and planning, but pretty much anything that they need help with.
Patrice O'Brien:	Thanks, David. Amanda?
Amanda Linton:	And my name is Amanda Linton. I'm from the Institute of Certified Bookkeepers, as their CEO. I've also had my own small businesses in the past and probably most importantly, is my role as a speaker with Beyond Blue, which I've now been doing for about four years. So I'm really passionate about actually making sure that business owners get the impression and they realise the fact that they're not on their own. So us, as an organisation, we have approximately 6,500 members across Australia and our members all actually help support small businesses. So this is an exceptionally important topic and something that's pretty close to my heart.
Patrice O'Brien:	It sure is.
Tim Hoopmann:	Hi, my name’s Tim Hoopmann. I'm a small business owner and have been for many years. I owned and operated a bookkeeping practice for over 10 years, and certainly have sat at the coalface of running a small business. I'm now a speaker and a trainer. One of the things I do is I'm a speaker for Beyond Blue. That's been one of the most joyous things I've done over the last two years, to be able to help, in particular, small businesses, understand the importance of business mental health. And I also work with small business in talking about technology and how they can use that as an enabler in their business to run a much more productive and seamless business. Thanks.
Patrice O'Brien:	Thank you all. So, I think, as you can really see, we've got an incredible panel today who will really bring diverse experience to the discussion that we're about to have. So that's really fantastic, and it's great, as part of the panel as well, to have both Amanda and Tim who are part of our Speakers Bureau at Beyond Blue. So our speakers have all got their own personal experience of depression, or anxiety, or for some of our speakers, of suicidality, and they share their own stories to really reduce stigma and show others that there's hope and there's opportunity to recover and to lead fulfilling lives. So it's great to have that real personal experience of what we're going to talk about today as well. So I might just give a bit of a general overview of why we're all here and why this topic is so important for Beyond Blue. So Beyond Blue has run a Workplace program for many years now. When Beyond Blue was first founded, we found that the workplace setting was one where people were really telling us that a change needed to occur from a mental health perspective. So we've focused on workplaces for a long time. And I think at Beyond Blue, it took us a little while to cotton on to the absolute importance of small business mental health, when we talked about workplaces, and to realise that it is a slightly different conversation. Small businesses don't have access to the same resources to tackle some of these challenges that larger businesses do. And also, small businesses, by their very nature, can face their own series of challenges that can create issues from a mental health perspective. And we'll talk a little bit more about that today. So once we really realised at Beyond Blue that this was a topic that needed more attention, we started our Small Business program within our broader Workplace program. And part of our thinking around that was that small businesses make up about, almost 50%, of all working Australians. So this is an incredibly important group and one that we just simply can't afford to miss out on. When we started the program, we really needed to think about; what does it look like, what are the different things that small business owners need, what's different to the broader Workplace program? And the only way to get the answers to those questions was to go out and ask the people themselves. So we created a number of different network groups and reference groups and we were very lucky to have a number of people involved, who gave us their insights. And over the last few years that we've been doing this, one of the things that we've heard, time and time again, from small business owners, is, "If you want me to focus on my own mental health and on the mental health of my small business, then you really need to bring that information to the places that I already go. So that might be to my accountant, to my bookkeeper, to my small business mentor, to the ATO, or it might very well be sitting around the kitchen table. But don't expect me, when I'm so busy running my business, to be able to do a whole lot of extra work, to go looking for this. Make the information that I need to know available where I'm at and when I need to be there.". So that was a message that we really heard a lot and we'll talk a bit more about that today. Interestingly, at the same time, we also heard this message from a number of organisations who look after accountants or bookkeepers, from organisations, like the ATO, whose staff are dealing with small business owners every day. And they said, "Hey, we're suddenly finding that our staff are at the coalface when something goes wrong.”. And suddenly, they're not counsellors, they're not psychologists, but they're getting involved in these conversations about people who are really struggling. So from that duel perspective, we realised that we really needed to focus on how we could support those small business intermediaries, or small business advisors, to play that role of supporting a small business owner. So, to that end, we have just launched a new resource on our Heads Up website, which is all about helping those advisors to play a role that they can play in supporting small business owners. So that's a big reason that we're here chatting today and all of these guys have checked out the new resource and we’ll make some information available to all of you, and so we'll talk a little bit about that resource as we go through today. So that's a bit of a background of why we're all here. But I really want to kick off the conversation by getting a bit of an understanding about what some of those specific challenges that small business owners face, what they are, and what they look like. So Tim, did you want to kick off with that for us?
Tim Hoopmann:	Thanks, Patrice. Certainly, in my experience as a small business owner, when you start out, everything is exciting, and you're on the go. But what can happen relatively quickly is you can feel things such as isolation. So if you've come from an environment where you've had support people or teams around you in the past, when you're standing and operating your own business, it can be quite isolating and that can be very, very challenging. And I think the other observation that I would make, from a personal experience, is the many, many hats you need to wear. So that is often challenging and I always say to people, while it's exciting at first, probably one of the biggest challenges I would tend to find is, I had a number of masters, and sometimes I didn't know how to deal with them all at once. So if I would think about them, one, it could be certainly your customers, they are very important to your business. But now you have a team of people, if you have a team, or sometimes it's just yourself, but if you have a team of people, you now have employees that you're responsible for, week in and week out. You have suppliers that are really important to how your business operates. And then, also, you have the ATO. And in the past, if you're just an employee, you would have your tax organised by your employer, but now you're responsible. And so there are a number of challenges that come with wearing multiple hats, and wondering which hat I have to wear, at what time.
Patrice O'Brien:	Great, thank you. And, David, was there anything that you wanted to add from what you've seen about those challenges?
David Gregory:	Yeah, sure. I totally agree with Tim. But I think there's also a real sense within small business that they have to be skilled in absolutely everything. And that's just an impossibility. The valuable thing is for them to surround themselves with people that have that understanding rather than have that understanding themselves. So to get a mentor, get an accountant, speak to the ATO, speak to their lawyer, they're all critical tools that they can use to help them survive in the challenge. I also think that small businesses have a ‘field of dreams’ mentality, that if they build it, they will come, that there will be this massive queue that will form at their door, and the real challenge is, when that doesn't happen, how that impacts on them. Having a mentor or an advisor, even just friends that you can talk to around the kitchen table, can start to bring up some ideas that will allow you to take things to market or to just release the pressure valve.
Patrice O'Brien:	I think in that, you both really clearly articulated some of those challenges, but also some of the opportunities early on. And Beyond Blue did some research around small business mental health and one of the things it found was that a really significant protective factor for small business owners, is if they've been able to create a network of support early on. So I think that's one of the key messages that we would have, is that, create that network early, because once things start to go wrong, it's very hard to create it then. So if that's one of the first steps, that's a really key thing. And another point that I just wanted to raise, following off on something that you said, Tim, is just to acknowledge that a small business owner, even within that group, can look really different. Because a small business can be up to 20 staff, and so we're kind of talking about having quite a few people to manage for a larger small business, and then all the way through to a micro business, where it's really up to only about four people, and then you've got very close personal interactions, and then you've got your sole traders, who are literally reliant on themselves. So even within that, there's some different challenges that we'll touch on as we go through. So I really wanted to start to get into this idea of the role that advisors can play, and I might start with you, Amanda, because I know you've had a lot of experience in this. But can you tell us a bit about what you think that role that a small business advisor can play and what you've seen from your perspective?
Amanda Linton:	So it's a really interesting question and it's not a short answer, unfortunately, in the fact that, as an advisor to business, regardless of what capacity that is, you tend to have an expectation that you go in from a fairly technical standpoint. So you go in with an expectation that you might be helping them as a bookkeeper, or as an accountant, or as a business mentor, and so you sort of have a framework around how that works, and then you might walk into these small businesses on a day-to-day basis, and all of a sudden, because they are small businesses, you become a bit of a confidante. So as trust builds between advisors and small business owners, that tends to become a little bit more broad-sweeping. So you end up going in with one expectation, as an advisor, to help them with a particular part of their business, and next thing you know, you're becoming a marriage counsellor, or a guidance counsellor, or helping them through some really significant challenges. So the role of an advisor, whereas I think at one stage, it was fairly clinical and fairly technical, it's so much more than that nowadays. It's so much more about being empowered and having tools to help small business, in particular, in a broad-sweeping array of areas.
Patrice O'Brien:	Yeah and I think we'll come back and talk a bit more about some of that at the moment. But I think it's important for those advisors, when that role does merge a bit, to also reassure themselves that they're not responsible for being a psychologist or something like that and I think it's really important that we say that up front because I think that's an unreasonable and unfair expectation. But we'll come back and touch on that a bit more in a moment. But I might get each of you to talk, just a little bit generally, about how you see that role. So maybe we'll go to you, David.
David Gregory:	Sure. We've had lots of experience with people that have been impacted by disaster and challenges. SBMS [Small Business Mentoring Service] was heavily involved during Black Saturday and we worked with about 1,500 businesses, that it wasn't just the normal problems of business failure; they had tragedy in their life, they had loss of community. Much of what the mentor was doing was to sit down with them and release that pressure valve, to steer them through the regulatory components, to steer them through to the right agencies, and, in many cases, triage them to identify what the mentor couldn't do, but what another agency could do. And I think that's a critical component. As you alluded to, an advisor shouldn't expect to be a clinician, but they can be the starting point to access the right resources, like the Beyond Blue templates, tools, and advisory sheets. And it's also an opportunity just to be the ear that listens and the shoulder on which to lean, because that's such a critical point for any small business.
Patrice O'Brien:	Yeah, I think, incredible points. And sometimes people can feel that there's a lot they need to do, but actually just being a listening ear is sometimes the key thing really, isn't it, that that people really need. And then I think as well, that role of being a conduit and being aware of where to point people in the right direction and that's what Beyond Blue’s really tried to do with this new resource that we've developed, is to help people with that, to give them clear pointers about where to go and make it a bit of a navigation tool. So it sounds like that could be really useful. What about from your perspective, [Andrew]?
Andrew Watson:	It's interesting that David was talking about after natural disasters and I think looking at how governments support small businesses, we've probably, unfortunately, in Australia, we're used to having severe natural disasters, and we've probably got some good support around that. It's been a really good initiative, I think, that working with Beyond Blue and other organisations, over the last couple of years, we've had a bit of a focus around both mental health, but other sort of setbacks that businesses can face, that probably aren't as public as those disasters, but can be just as traumatic and require the same sort of support. So it is where, from the ATO, we've got support mechanisms in place, and we've got, on our website, there's a link under small business mental health, that's got some information there. But particularly through advisors as a way to reach out, that when they've got a setback, to talk to someone. That's where we find often the ATO’s at the end of the chain and it's those small businesses that haven't reached out or maybe not shared with their advisors, the problems don't tend to go away. We get success when people either engage with us, or, as most small businesses do, they'll engage through a BAS agent, through a tax agent, and we recognise tax and BAS agents play a variety of roles for small businesses around this. So it's interesting and hopefully, things like this help raise some awareness, of these one-off things, that there is as much support available as there is when we've got north Queensland floods or droughts or whatever. But we do need people to talk to their advisors or come talk to government.
Patrice O'Brien:	Yeah, that's right. And what about from your perspective, Tim, I know you've got some ideas about having those conversations as early as possible?
Tim Hoopmann:	There's a couple of interesting points and Amanda, you brought up before that, often, as the advisor, you have such an in-depth understanding or view of what's going on in that business. And so, especially if, say you're a bookkeeper, an accountant, you are right in there. So you have access and visibility to everything. So one of the interesting things around that is, what, as that advisor, are you seeing, and what's the insight or the observation that you could provide early on to that business owner, even sometimes when they're telling you they don't want it, or they're unhappy about something else. How can you be empathetic to the fact that you do have information and you need to share it with them. I think that that's, to your point, Andrew, before, about getting in early. I'm also a big advocate of technology as an enabler. A lot of the work that's done now, certainly from a financial perspective, gives greater insight earlier on. And if you are able to do that, for a business owner, provide those insights, share with them information, you can't make them do things, but you can share that and you can continue to provide that. I think that that's a great thing in terms of early on.
Patrice O'Brien:	So can you give us like a real-life story or example of something like that, Tim?
Tim Hoopmann:	Yeah, great. I'll go back to technology. So one of the things, in terms of running my bookkeeping practice, was advent of cloud accounting and connected apps. And I am a great believer, that that has been a big game changer for small business, and one of the things I've always said, it puts the business owner back in the driver's seat, because they could go on and have access to that information in real-time, and as I've always said, make informed business decisions. So if they've got their information in the cloud, they've got a connected app, and then you as the bookkeeper or the accountant are working with, and say a bookkeeper, working with them weekly, as we were doing, then you can be giving them real-time information. And if nothing else, that is the first step to greater visibility about what's going to go on. And probably, in some cases, understanding the issue before they're going to happen.
Patrice O'Brien:	Yeah, that's great. And, David, do you have some examples?
David Gregory:	Yeah, I agree totally with what Tim’s saying, that early intervention component, particularly when you're advising people that might have tax issues, to get them to speak to the ATO as early as possible. I wanted to highlight a particular client we had a number of years ago. There was a woman who, while sitting with a mentor, suddenly realised some of the challenges that she had. And over the course of active listening by the mentor, it was revealed that she was paying credit cards with credit cards, and she had $50,000 or $60,000 worth of debt. Now, it's situations where they don't know what they don't know. So the advisor can steer them through to solutions. And they will be losing sleep and impacting on their mental health, because of the stresses of those, when, just by sitting down, a clear path can be established. And if you can see light at the end of the tunnel, that, again, can be a pressure release.
Patrice O'Brien:	Yeah, great example. And what about, I don't know if you've got any examples of this, Amanda, and either from your own experience of being with an advisor or being an advisor to businesses, but what are the signs that you might pick up on that suggests that not only is someone's business not doing well, but that that person is not doing well themselves?
Amanda Linton:	So I think there are a couple of really key tell-tale signs. The first is, and I know both from personal experience and also with the businesses I've worked with, the first is withdrawal. They tend to withdraw from just general consistent conversations. So it could be not returning a phone call, where you know that they would normally do that. It could be, if you are an advisor and you're actually sitting on-site, and that happens in varying degrees nowadays, but if you're actually sitting and interacting with people, sometimes it's just listening to the kinds of conversations that you're having. So conversation can tend to shift from, "I'm very task-focused and task-oriented about my business" to now, "I'm not sleeping” or “I'm so exhausted because I'm trying to wear all these hats". I think that's a really important part for intermediaries to be really careful of as well. As you say, you need to look after yourself, as an intermediary, first and foremost, but to look for some of those more subtle signs. So, and I say, from my experience, withdrawal is the classic one. The other one is, is things like leaving things to the last minute and that, as Andrew said, quite often the Tax Office is the very end of the line. So being able to actually engage early, and it's not in our capacity, particularly as bookkeepers and accountants and mentors, sometimes it's looking beyond the figures, it's actually looking at their own behaviour. So, as I say, are they engaging with you, is the business owner having a conversation with you about things, you're putting information in front of them, as Tim was saying, and they’re, "Oh I'm not interested". So where does that come from? Is it that they're not interested or they're just so overwhelmed with everything that they have to do, that you need to look beyond the technicalities of what you're actually sitting there to do. And I know, in my experience, that that was the first sign, when it was pointed out, that someone called me out on, was the fact that, "Oh, we don't see you around as much anymore. You don't come to networking events as much anymore. You're not answering my phone calls" those kinds of things. So they're really key tell-tale signs that maybe there's something going on in the background that they haven't actually, that goes beyond the figures and goes beyond the mechanics of actually being a business owner. So what's happening with them, personally.
Patrice O'Brien:	Yeah. Do any of you have examples through your agency, or your staff, or yourselves, of when you've seen those signs, how you can then manage that, remembering that your role isn't as a counsellor, but what sort of things can you do?
Tim Hoopmann:	Yeah, I've got a couple. Absolutely spot on, I agree with everything Amanda said. One of the other things is severe change of behaviour. I've read a lot in the information that Beyond Blue put out around anger and that can often be a change. Often, though, we expect that people just get angry and so that's part of running a business or part of how they are. But that can be a real tell-tale sign. A number of years ago, I had a situation where one of my staff was on the verge of being bullied on email and it was incredibly frightening for me because it was in a silo of an email. So, two points around that. One is, was there a change of behaviour in the client? Absolutely. Was I so close to it? No. But how then do you bring that out in your staff. So one of the things we did was completely changed the way we manage our emails, so that everybody had visibility, so we could all see if something had changed. And that was either, with the staff member, or, in particular, in this case, with the client. Now, they were under severe pressure and we were able to help and deal with them. But had it stayed in that silo of just one of the staff who didn't have the courage to speak about it, it could have got a lot worse. So, for me, identifying, is anger really just someone who's an angry person, or is it really underlying, and I would say that it's certainly, in a lot of experiences that I've had with small business owners, and I've personally had that with myself, anger is a real trigger sign.
Patrice O'Brien:	Yeah. And what about you, Andrew, at the ATO?
Andrew Watson:	We've seen, particularly where it comes to people have either stopped paying their tax bills or they've stopped lodging activity statements or tax returns, that withdrawal aspect. But with the scale that we operate, it gets confusing around, is that a withdrawal or is it going out of business or the unknown? Which is why we encourage people to get in touch. But from speaking to some people in our debt area on the call centre, when they've gotten hold of someone that's owed some money, they've gotten the angry response. It's actually taken now and some greater awareness, we've worked with our people to try and get some empathy or to try to ask some questions to try get behind the anger, apart from just not wanting to pay money, and to actually then give people the opportunity to explain their situation. Once people do that, we've actually got lots of options and flexibility, if you're actually underlying you've got a viable business, we're going to work with you to keep that business going. So payment plans, deferring some of your obligations, because they won’t go away off themselves, but there's a way to work through it. And I do believe, from the number of stories, there has been a bit of a shift. It's both in the community, greater awareness around mental health issues, but some active stuff that we've been doing with our staff, including with Beyond Blue, including getting representative tax and BAS agents in to share stories with our people. I don’t think there's a better way to actually understand some of these things than through the power of stories and hearing, first-hand, from people. So that's where we're starting to see a difference, and encourage people that the preconception of the Tax Office and even that old joke of introducing ourselves as “We're from the Tax Office, we're here to help you”. We're actually the Tax Office, and we're actually here to help viable businesses stay in business and thrive. That's actually fundamentally our roll around small business. So if you've got some troubles with your clients, you've got some troubles, talking’s the best way, and we're getting more and more good stories of people being able to work with us and work through it.
Patrice O'Brien:	Yeah. And look, I can certainly say, from my time of working in this space, I've had the absolute pleasure to talk with lots of people from the Tax Office and also to hear from other people. And I think it's a bit like turning the Titanic, to change some of those perceptions, but I think it is changing. And I know that there's lots of work that the ATO has done really on working with your frontline staff on increasing their understanding of not only mental health, but all the other things that could be going on for a small business owner at that point in their lives. And think some of those things, you're seeing those changes in how they're dealing with then their clients and customers.
Andrew Watson:	Yeah. So that's, I think, just encourage the conversations and also understand there's 18,000 people at the ATO. There's also around about 160,000 people that either are tax or BAS agents or work for tax and BAS agents. A lot of them focus on supporting small business. And, again, a lot of those, greater awareness there. So there's a lot of people out there that small businesses can go to.
Patrice O'Brien:	Yeah, fantastic. One of the other things that I was going to mention is, we've talked a lot about the accountants, and the bookkeepers, and the ATO, and mentors. What about family members? Like often, it might be the partner at home who really is the one who knows most about what's going on in the business. Do any of you have any stories or examples of how they can support?
David Gregory:	I think you're absolutely right. But there's a yin and yang to this. Because the person that you love the most, if that's the person you're in business with, and you're going home, and you're talking business at work, and then you're talking business at home, there is no break, it's just constant. Having said that, the opportunity to talk with family and friends and partners in business is such a crucial element. They know you better, they can identify some of those nuances that perhaps other people wouldn't notice. They'll also see that there is a sense of sadness in a person's eyes that suddenly starts to reveal and that comes over time. And a mentor and a loved one can see that because you work very closely. So, yeah, I think you're really right, it has to be a combination of those that live in your life and those that have access to it and that you open up to.
Amanda Linton:	Can I just say on that point, it's a really interesting dynamic to watch with family members, too. And I think it's really important to understand that a lot of family members, too, also don't know how to react. And they don't have the answers, they're not counsellors. And I think sometimes, as family members trying to support someone through a challenge, that you can see a change in behaviour, that sometimes that you might see it. Like I know I have the kind of personality where I just want to fix someone. And that's not always possible. So sometimes, it's about knowing, from a family member perspective, too, who do I reach out to? And finding that resource can be really challenging. So that's why I'm a huge advocate of what Beyond Blue has been doing, because you have taken it to another level, because by identifying that micro and small businesses are different. And, exactly as David just mentions, is, a lot of them are family businesses. So that you do have the work and you don't get that break when you go home and that can be a challenge as well. But I think it's also really important for family to understand that while you can be there to support and to help and identify, potentially changes in behaviour, that you're not necessarily going to be geared to be able to fix the problem as well. So being able to guide family members of small businesses to adequate resources. And that's where I love the work that Beyond Blue have put into the new resources, to be able to help families actually help partners that have businesses and challenges as well. Because they don't always have all the answers.
Patrice O'Brien:	That's right. And we've tried to make the resource exactly for that. So it really is a resource that's not only just for people who are interacting with small business owners in a professional sense, but also in a family or friends sense as well. So we did think about whether we needed two different versions. But then as we started working on it, we realised that a lot of the information and advice is actually the same, whatever advisory role you're playing. So I think that's fantastic. Just on this topic, I just wanted to ask one other question that I think is really important for people to hear about. Have any of you ever been in a situation where you were supporting someone and realised, or staff been in the situation, and realised they needed immediate support, where you were actually really concerned with their immediate safety? A couple of nods. David?
David Gregory:	Yeah. We've had that in a number of instances because we do a lot of work in disaster areas, with fire, floods, and the mine fires and those sort of things. And these are such impactful times, that the mentor has been trained to sit down with people, and not be a clinician, but to be able to steer the conversation, to find out more information, and to stay with those people and to steer it through to the right resources. This particular tool is going to be spectacular for them. I hark back to many years ago, I remember going to a disaster area, sitting down with clients for the whole day, and then on the way back home, sitting with a mentor on the side of the road, where we just both sat there and cried for a while. And that was our debriefing time and it was a relief valve, because we didn't have the resources and tools that are being developed. Now, we would have a greater understanding of what we can do to help. And that's so, so critical.
Amanda Linton:	I think that pressure valve conversation is, that's something I think is important to have as well. Because one of the things that I've seen, I know, I've worked with a small business owner, a number of years ago, who had a family tragedy, the loss of a child, which is devastating from anyone's perspective. And that sort of set them on a bit of a spiral of, you know, of what am I here for, why is nothing working, and a whole range of things like that. And so we were in the, and I do call it a fortunate position and a privileged position, to be able to, for this gentleman, we spoke to him and said, "Look, we understand the challenges that you're going through. We don't, for one moment, propose to know exactly what that's like or what can we do to help?". And what actually came out of that, was being able to guide him to some resources to be able to help bring his life back on track. So it wasn't about us having the answers, but it was about actually being able to say, "Look, we can actually help you to access some resources to help out". And that was a combination of things. He'd fallen behind in his reporting requirements, he had not paid his staff for about a month, who were extremely forgiving because of the situation that they were in. But he was sitting there, and the conversation did go to those suicidal tendencies and he actually said, "I'm actually just so glad that someone will listen, not fix it, but listen, and help guide me in the right direction". And that was probably one of the most powerful conversations that I've ever had and it was a little bit the same [as David’s story], it was on the way home, pull over on the side of the road, and break into tears because as I say, I just wanted to fix it for him, and you can't, unless you’re trained in the space. But to be able to know that you can actually have that experience of helping to guide someone and bring them back from a really dark place, that's a really powerful thing, as an intermediary or an advisor, to be able to guide someone through that. So not have the answers, but have the tools to guide them.
Patrice O'Brien:	Yeah. And I think as we said earlier, being able to play that navigational role for someone, and again, this resource that we've developed really helps to do that. So on this topic, it is really important to point out that, for any advisors, if you are with someone and you realise that they're at an immediate risk, it's really important, unless you're concerned about your own safety, it's really important not to leave them on their own and it's really important to access one of those immediate resources. So whether that be calling the Beyond Blue Support Service, or Lifeline, or if you're really concerned about immediate danger, then you just call 000 and you just get that immediate support and it's okay to do that. So I think that's a really important point. But what you both touched on there was that we've had this discussion around this brilliant role that advisors can play and how important that is for small business owners. But I think it's important that we also talk about, and we have touched on this, but how does the advisor look after themselves through that? And you both just gave some examples there. So just wanted to get a bit of a sense about any thoughts that any of you have about how you look after yourself in this role, how you look after your mentors, how you look after your frontline staff, when they’re playing that role of supporting small business owners. and remembering that, for you guys as well, I imagine, a lot of those advisers are themselves a small business. So Tim, did you have thoughts about that?
Tim Hoopmann:	I think one of the areas is around boundaries. So if you're going to be helping other people, which I think’s very important in the roles that we play, it's about ensuring that you understand what the boundaries are and you’ve expressed those boundaries, in particular, to your team, if they're also frontline with your customers who may come in contact with people that are somewhat in distress. So when you understand those boundaries, it helps you to be able to understand what you can do and where you can go, in terms of supporting them, without having to be everything. And then not feeling guilty that we stop at these boundaries. And I think, certainly, being able to do that is a really good start. I think to your other point about yourself, one of the things that I've learnt, in particular, over the last four years, that if I don't take care of myself, I can't help anyone else, effectively, no matter what. So if I'm looking after my own mental health, if I'm taking care of myself, and to some people, that might sound selfish, but you really need to start with you, and then your team, and then you're in a great position to be able to support your customers. And then you'll do the right things for them on an ongoing basis and you'll be more alert to things, you'll be happy to have a conversation. Three years ago, I couldn't have had a conversation with someone that was in distress. I could easily sit in front of somebody now, and it's a joy to do it. But it took me a while to learn and get into that space. So I think it's about yourself, it's about the boundaries, and it's about making sure that you and your team are really in a good place around that.
Patrice O'Brien:	But I think that's a fantastic point. Did anyone want to add, David?
David Gregory:	Organisationally, we have processes and policies in place to train the mentors, to ensure that they they’re armed with skills. If they're armed with knowledge, then they feel more relaxed going and talking to a client, they feel like they've got a solution at hand if they need it, they've got the resources available through Beyond Blue. So they can feel less under pressure themselves. And I think that's a critical element for them.
Patrice O'Brien:	Yeah, I think that's so important and that's a lot of the message we've heard, is that, actually, in terms of protecting the mental health of these advisors, they need to be armed with the right tools, because then it's not as stressful, then you can have the conversation. So I think that's a great point.
Tim Hoopmann:	Just to add, I think the information that I've read through in this tool, it's incredibly powerful for doing exactly that. I could easily go to the tool, find exactly what I need to think about in terms of helping somebody else or looking after myself, and easily direct somebody there. And the power of that is, first and foremost, it saves you a lot of time in Googling and trying to piece together bits and pieces. So it's incredibly powerful from a time perspective. But then you've got the right information that you can hand on confidently and not go, "Well, I'm not really sure whether that's right". So pulling all that together, incredibly powerful.
Amanda Linton:	I think, as an advisor, too, sometimes, and I could not agree more with what Tim said about looking after yourself, and I know from first-hand experience, what can happen when you don't do that. And so, sometimes, as advisors, too, we do tend to get, particularly if you're an advisor that's working in a silo yourself, and we don't think about that enough, is that, and I know, particularly with a lot of our members, they're sole practitioner, female, so the general type of personality in our space tends to be someone who just wants to fix things, and that's not always possible. And they're juggling, like the small businesses that they're dealing with, they're wearing multiple hats and family commitments, etc. But I think one of the things is, and I certainly know one of the things that our community have heard me speak about a lot, is exactly that, is about boundaries, putting boundaries around yourself. And it is, it's partially self-preservation, but it can be pretty explosive when you don't do that, and when you try and be a bit of everything to everyone. And different business models, whether it be a mentor, or a bookkeeper, or an accountant, will be different. That's the thing to realise. So for some people in those advisory roles, their business model is that they work after hours, for argument's sake, because they have care responsibilities. And if that's what their model is, then that's great. But they need to know what that is and look after themselves in that space. But if you run a practice, like I did and Tim has, where you have other team members to look after, you can't look after someone if you're not looking after yourself, and that is just, as I said, and it can have explosive consequences if you get that wrong. So having those boundaries around, and the boundaries could be a number of things; the time that you're available for a client to contact you. If you sit there and say, "I'm not going to work after 7:00 at night”, yet a client will ring you at 10:00 and you'll answer the phone, well, you're not really setting a clear expectation of boundaries. So expectations and boundaries is key and critical for an advisor to be able to look after themselves. And, as Tim said, it's not about being a bit self-centred, it's just about being realistic about what you can and can't actually manage to do yourself.
Patrice O'Brien:	Yeah, I think they're great points. I have a feeling that we could sit here and talk about this topic for a lot longer. But we've all probably got lots of other things we have to go and do as well. But what I'd really love to do, in closing out today, is just ask each of you to give your number one top tip to a small business advisor, whoever it may be, whether it's a professional or a family member, what's your top tip about how they can provide that support to a small business owner while still looking after themselves? Did you want to kick off, Andrew?
Andrew Watson:	I think I'm just going to be repeating the same message of, come early around those regulatory requirements, tax, whichever government departments, but come early on behalf of your client, and it gives our people so much more flexibility to come to arrangements, where, as I said, we can sort people through a difficult period and ideally have them running a viable, vibrant business afterwards.
Patrice O'Brien:	And don't be scared of the ATO.
Andrew Watson:	Don't be scared of the ATO.
David Gregory:	A couple of things. First of all, there is a need for support by stealth. I think the opportunity with the resource is to give that to our mentors and advisors and while they're reading it for somebody else, they’re reading it for themselves as well. So they’re gaining knowledge as to how they can support themselves. The second thing is something we always raise in mentor training, is that you are born with two ears and one mouth, so listen twice as much as you speak. If you sit down in front of somebody, don't come up with the solution within the first five seconds, it might be the very next question they raise, that gives you insights into them. So you've really got to listen to the whole story.
Patrice O'Brien:	Yeah, fantastic. I love “support by stealth” as well, that's great. I'm going to steal that one. [Amanda?]
Amanda Linton:	I think from my perspective, it's actually just about making sure that you don't expect too much of yourself. So don't try and think you have to fix it, you have to fix the situation, understand your boundaries as well, but also to arm yourself with the tools to be able to help someone. So this tool is a fantastic way to do that. So, as I say, my number one tip is, don't try and be everything to everyone. If dealing with mental health is not your key critical area of advisory, then, as I said, arm yourself with the tools to point people in the right direction and be that true intermediary, and be kind to yourself, that you don't have all the answers, because someone else will be there to help you.
Tim Hoopmann:	I think, one of the first things would be, as an advisory in this space, is to understand what depression and anxiety is. And to get a good understanding of that and share it with your team, because it's definitely on a continuum, and it can change, people can change quite quickly. And so understand a little more about that. So as you go about advising, you start to be able to identify a change in behaviour or a trigger that you think has set somebody off, or you know that's really important to them. So kind of understanding that, you don't have to be a psychologist, but you certainly need to understand that, so that then when you step into that realm, you have a really clear ability to be able to assess the situation, and then, to what the others were saying, getting there early, sit and have a conversation. I love having those conversations now, I feel completely confident in doing them. And I know, to David's point, that it is about listening, absolutely, to start with. And I think if you put all of those things together, it'll make that actually a joy[ous] to be able to do. And then the support information is just absolutely amazing.
Patrice O'Brien:	Fantastic. And thanks very much for raising the continuum of mental health as well, because that was something I was going to close off on, that we've talked quite a bit in the discussion today, which is important, about when people get to that end of the continuum, where they're not doing as well. But mental health is exactly like physical health, that we can all have times when we're well, and when we're not as well, and when we're very unwell. And I think one of the important things for small business owners is really thinking, right at the beginning of setting up your business, “What's my business plan, but what's my wellbeing plan?”. And this resource has some great links to wellbeing plans and that sort of thing as well, so that you're thinking about, “When the going gets tough, how am I going to make sure that I'm looking after myself as well as looking after my business?”. So I think that's another really important thing, capitalise on the time when things are going really well, to make plans for, because, at some point, we're all going to get, whether we become actually depressed or anxious, hopefully not, but we're all going to get at least stressed along the way or we're all going to have dips along the way. And so using those times when things are going well to really capitalise on, what can we plan to look after ourselves, plan for yourself, as much as you plan for your business. Well, I think this has been a really fantastic discussion. And certainly, from my point of view, it's really exciting to hear that you all feel that this new resource for small businesses will be something that you'll be able to all use. And certainly for our audience, we'll have some information for you that you can see about where to go and download this resource. So please feel free to access it and share it. And I'd really just like to finish today by thanking all of you so much, not only for what you've done today in sharing your precious time with us, but for what you all do in your roles every day to really bringing mental health to the fore and creating this is a really key important part of what you all do, we're really grateful. And also, I'd just like to thank the Workplace team at Beyond Blue, who've helped us all to prepare for today and for this great conversation. And I hope that our audience has got a lot out of it. So, thank you.
All:	Thank you.

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Small business mental health - the role of work contacts, friends and family

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